3/25/2011

If everything works out, there may be a new voice here soon, in addition to Aaron’s. Someone whose work has been linked here in numerous recent posts. An honest person who understands how badly the media has been screwing up lately.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

Watching events from afar, the Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear Meltdown trifecta in Japan really strikes me as like a natural disaster version of 9-11. In the immediate aftermath it was horror in slow motion, but then even after you thought things should have been over, it turns out it wasn’t. I remember an international friend being shocked when I mentioned in an email some three months later that they were still pulling bodies out of the rubble at the World Trade Center. And some two weeks later, things are still pretty bad in Fukushima, Japan:

Japanese officials on Friday began quietly encouraging people to evacuate a larger swath of territory around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a sign that they hold little hope that the crippled facility will soon be brought under control.

The authorities said they would now assist people who want to leave the area from 12 to 19 miles outside the crippled plant and said they were now encouraging “voluntary evacuation” from the area. Those people had been advised March 15 to remain indoors, while those within a 12-mile radius of the plant had been ordered to evacuate.

The United States has recommended that its citizens stay at least 50 miles away from the plant.

Speaking to a national audience in a press conference Friday night to mark the two weeks since the magnitude 9.0 quake and the devastating tsunami that followed it, Prime Minister Naoto Kan dodged a reporter’s question about whether the government was ordering a full evacuation, saying officials were simply following the recommendation of the Japan Nuclear Safety Commission.In the latest setback to the effort to contain the nuclear crisis, evidence emerged that the reactor vessel of the No. 3 unit may have been damaged, an official said Friday. The development, described at a news conference by Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, raises the possibility that radiation from the mox fuel in the reactor — a combination of uranium and plutonium — could be released.

One sign that a breach may have occurred in the reactor vessel, Mr. Nishiyama said, took place on Thursday when three workers who were trying to connect an electrical cable to a pump in a turbine building next to the reactor were injured when they stepped into water that was found to be significantly more radioactive than normal in a reactor.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sock puppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply.

Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself, a lot.

And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny.

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And for our Friday frivolity, we have an update on another story we mentioned a bit back. You might remember I posted on the long-delayed video game Duke Nukem Forever, writing:

And of course Gearbox, is stating that this game is coming out on May 3 of this year (source). For those who don’t know, this game has become legendary in the way it has taken for-frickin’-ever to come out. It has literally been in development hell for over twelve years, until the company that originally created it went under.

And even if you don’t care about games, I found the story interesting because of that story of development hell it went through. But I also believed that yes, finally, it would come out.

Well, yesterday we learned that the Duke was being delayed, again. In fact they announced it in a pretty funny video, here:

But one question that has been raised is this. Are they genuinely having a problem? Or is this a planned delay for publicity’s sake? The sheer silliness of the video makes you wonder if they always planned on making it a little delayed, just to get people talking about it.

Two weeks after he started, Andrew Breitbart has been banned from the front page of the Huffington Post, because of comments he made about Van Jones elsewhere. Because, you see, HuffPo is all about avoiding ad hominem attacks.

From this point forward, Patterico will never again blog at the Huffington Post, unless this decision is reversed. Lee Stranahan, for his part, says the same.

Now, Lee’s announcement is a little more dramatic than mine, since I never blogged there to begin with. Still, you gotta take a stand!

I’ll keep this short. As I wrote this morning, writing for the Huffington Post has been one of the great joys of my life for the past few years and I’ve been proud to be associated with them.

But as a writer, this latest move by The Huffington Post of banning Andrew Breitbart from their front page (because of comments he made to a different website) is both unprecedented, arbitrary and deeply offensive to the intellectual openness that Arianna Huffington has purported to believe in.

Although I’ve had a number of pieces featured there, I’m certainly not a huge presence at HuffPost so in that sense, I don’t expect this move on my part to make much of a ripple but I can’t in good conscience support this awful, short sighted move by the site that I loved.

First on the docket: Here’s what HuffPo writer Jason Linkins wrote in 2008 about right wing writer Jerome Corsi:

I want to end today by offering my thanks to Jerome Corsi, white-supremacist Swift Boat turd heel un-American wouldn’t-piss-on-ya-if-you-were-on-fire foamy chancre on the ass of subhumanity extraordinaire. You want to talk about voter enthusiasm? Well, Mr. Corsi, the thought of casting vote against everything you stand for doesn’t just make me feel enthusiastic, it makes me feel ten feet taller, and I get the coppery taste of the gladiator in my mouth. So thank you, pig. [E.A.]

Seems ad hominem to me! It’s almost hard to see how you could be more ad hominem…. Since Linkins clearly violated the tenets of debate and civil discourse HuffPo has strived for since the day they launched, he’s as good as gone from their front page. Open and shut. … Looks like the “nether regions” of HuffPo will be where you have to go to get the juicy stuff. … [Linkins on HuffPo front page right now–ed. That can’t be. Someone tell Arianna.]

No hypocrisy there!

Andrew Breitbart has been among the more unfairly vilified people on the Internet in recent memory, and is a perpetual target for those on the left who wish to silence speech. Their commonly used tactics include distortions, lies, and attempting to squelch speech by hitting their enemies in the pocketbook — such as mounting boycotts, contacting employers, and circulating petitions to influence the publishers of content they don’t like. In Andrew’s case, Media Matters for America and similar goons got Andrew banned from ABC News commentary on election night. They have succeeded in booting him off of the HuffPo front page. In every case, the attacks reveal a blatant double standard which is their hypocritical hallmark.

Every honest lefty blogging for the HuffPo should follow Stranahan’s lead. Then again, for all I know, with the defection of Stranahan, every honest lefty already has.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]

So news has been floating around that apparently Michele Bachmann is about to throw her hat into the ring for President. And you know what? I have already written the post on this topic months ago, over at Allergic to B.S. (language warning at the link), when they were talking about Scott Brown running for President. Here’s what I said there:

But let me say right here, right now. Don’t do it, Republicans. Scott Brown is an okay guy. I cheered when he won the Senate race. But here is the thing. Do you remember the last time we picked a president whose résumé was summed up with a few years as a state senator, and part of a term as a U.S. Senator? Do you know who the last President was who had so little experience?

Barrack Obama. How is that working out for you, Republicans?

Hell, how is that working out for anyone?

The fact is résumés matter. Let me tell you how I decide who to vote for, for president. I start with their previous work experience. I prefer someone to have some administrative experience. In my mind, the best preparation to be the president is to be a governor first: it’s almost the same job, only on a smaller scale. But I am willing to accept CEO of a corporation, a general in the army, or even mayor of a particularly large city. Then after I feel reasonably confident that the guy might know how to do the job, then I start looking into issues like ideology.

Oh and nothing matters more to me in ideology than terrorist-killing.

So like last time, you know who I wanted to be President? Giuliani. Mind you, he is more liberal than I am, but he had more administrative experience than most of them, and I like his position on terrorist-killing.

Now I guess with his military background, Brown has Obama beat except… well, then by 2012 Obama will have been president for four years. I mean he has to have learned how to do something by then, right? Right?

It might be tempting to think that by 2012 that Americans will be so sick of Obama that they will literally pick anyone else over him. But we shouldn’t give them a choice between Obama and “none of the above.” We should give them a choice between Obama and someone who won’t need on-the-job training.

So let’s cut this out right now.

Seriously, what more is there to say, except that by that assessment Scott Brown would be more qualified to be President than Bachmann? I like Bachmann, but I like her as a legislator, not as an administrator. But look at her resume. Here’s her official bio. And here’ the wikipedia page, if that can be trusted. I see nothing there that suggests she has enough executive experience to be President.

Now of course there is one good president you can point to that had about the same amount of executive experience, and that would be Lincoln. But to be very blunt, we were not smart when we chose Lincoln to be President. We were lucky. We picked a man with little (besides his evident intelligence) to suggest he was going to be the greatest president we ever had (in my opinion). And yeah, I suppose there is the possibility of that kind of untapped potential in Bachmann, or Brown for that matter. But how about instead, she goes and proves to me she knows how to run something, and then get back to me?

It might be the case that by next year Americans will be so sick of Obama that they will vote for almost anyone else. I am just about there myself and have been there for well over a year. But it is still important to offer a real alternative, not just someone who’s chief argument is that they couldn’t possibly be worse.

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